Ludwig Wittgenstein
A logical picture of facts is a thought.Collection: Facts
I'm doing philosophy like an old woman, first I'm looking for my pencil, then I'm looking for my glasses, then I'm looking for my pencil again.Collection: Philosophy
Language disguises the thought; so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be recognized.Collection: Clothes
The only life that is happy is the life that can renounce the amenities of the world. To it the amenities of the world are so many graces of fate.Collection: Happiness
Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. ...Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries.Collection: Philosophy
Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us.Collection: Philosophy
The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thought.Collection: Philosophy
Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical.Collection: Philosophical
Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn't the indistinct one often what we need?Collection: Needs
About what one can not speak, one must remain silent.Collection: Speak
The truth can be spoken only by someone who is already at home in it; not by someone who still lives in untruthfulness, and does no more than reach out towards it from within untruthfulness.Collection: Home
My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them--as steps--to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the whole world aright.Collection: Philosophical
Transparency painted in a picture produces its effect in a different way than opaqueness.Collection: Different
Schiller writes in a letter [to Goethe, 17 December 1795] of a 'poetic mood'. I think I know what he means, I think I am familiar with it myself. It is the mood of receptivity to nature and one in which one's thoughts seem as vivid as nature itself.Collection: Writing
So we do sometimes think because it has been found to pay.Collection: Thinking
A tautology's truth is certain, a proposition's possible, a contradiction's impossible.Collection: Impossible
All propositions are of equal value.Collection: Logic
Our civilization is characterized by the word "progress." Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features. Typically it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure. And even clarity is sought only.Collection: Civilization
The philosopher strives to find the liberating word, that is, the word that finally permits us to grasp what up to now has intangibly weighed down upon our consciousness.Collection: Philosophy
The form is the possibility of the structure.Collection: Possibility
White must be the lightest color in a picture.Collection: Color
Dark' and 'blackish' are not the same concept.Collection: Dark
Philosophy limits the thinkable and therefore the unthinkable.Collection: Philosophy
If we were to imagine an orange on the blue side or green on the red side or violet on the yellow side, it would give us the same impression as a north wind coming from the southwest.Collection: Blue
Burning in effigy. Kissing the picture of one's beloved... it aims at nothing at all; we just behave this way and then we feel satisfied.Collection: Kissing
Your questions refer to words; so I have to talk about words. You say:;: The point isn't the word, but its meaning, and you think of the meaning as a thing of the same kind as the word, though also different from the word. Here the word, there the meaning.Collection: Thinking
In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it, there is no value, - and if there were, it would be of no value.Collection: Doe
This procedure [selecting the simplest law], however, has no logical justification but only a psychological one.Collection: Law
It is possible--indeed possible even according to the old conception of logic--to give in advance a description of all 'true' logical propositions. Hence there can never be surprises in logic.Collection: Philosophical
Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly. Ludwig WittgensteinCollection: History
The philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas, that is what makes him a philosopher.Collection: Ideas
Don't think, but look! (PI 66)Collection: Carpe Diem
The world divides into facts.Collection: World
What Copernicus really achieved was not the discovery of a true theory but of a fertile new point of view.Collection: Discovery
I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again 'I know that that’s a tree', pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: 'This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.Collection: Philosophy
To understand a sentence means to understand a language. To understand a language means to be master of a technique.Collection: Mean
You can't hear God speak to someone else, you can hear him only when you are being addressed.Collection: Speak
My work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and of everything which I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one.Collection: Two
Philosophy unravels the knots in our thinking; hence its results must be simple, but its activity is as complicated as the knots that it unravels.Collection: Philosophy
My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul. . . .Collection: Attitude
Not only is there no guarantee of the temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say of its eternal survival after death; but, in any case, this assumption completely fails to accomplish the purpose for which it has always been intended. Or is some riddle solved by my surviving forever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life?Collection: Life
Philosophy can be said to consist of three activities: to see the commonsense answer, to get yourself so deeply into the problem that the common sense answer is unbearable, and to get from that situation back to the commonsense answer.Collection: Philosophy
Ethics and aesthetics are one.Collection: Ethics
Where our language suggests a body and there is none: there, we should like to say, is a spirit.Collection: Body
Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death.Collection: Religion
The popular scientific books by our scientists aren't the outcome of hard work, but are written when they are resting on their laurels.Collection: Book
The child learns to believe a host of things. I.e. it learns to act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakeably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.Collection: Children
I Once wrote: "In mathematics process and result are equivalent."Collection: Science
The fact that we can describe the motions of the world using Newtonian mechanics tell us nothing about the world. The fact that we do, does tell us something about the world.Collection: Doe